Jun. 05, 2015

What Is Sleep? A 'Superpower,' a 'Power Cleanse'

In his latest “Flame Challenge,”Alan Alda asked people to answer the question: “What is sleep?”And the judges on the contest? A panel of 11-year-olds, who voted Eric Galicia and Brandon Aldinger as the clearest explainers. Galicia and Aldinger join us to talk about how they approached the question and their guidelines for communicating science to maximum effect.

Plus, Matthew Walker, a sleep scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, has a clever analogy of his own for sleep. He says snoozing is a “power cleanse for the brain.” We talk to Walker about the connection between sleep and the accumulation of toxic proteins in our brains, and what that could mean for the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease.